Articles

I’ve written hundreds of articles for national magazines, including The New York Times, Gourmet, Food & Wine, Bon Appetit, Salon.com, Vogue, Glamour, Self, Marie Claire, Mother Jones, Sunset, Afar, Elle, the Daily Beast, San Francisco Examiner Magazine, O: the Oprah Magazine, and many others. I’ve been a contributing editor at Health, Good Housekeeping, More, and now at San Francisco Magazine and Craftsmanship Quarterly. Several of my articles are listed below.

Of any essay I’ve ever written, this one, “Why I Stopped Being a Vegetarian,” originally published in Salon.com in 2000, has been reprinted most, mainly in college readers.

My essay, “Food for the Heart,” (Eating Well, January/February 2007) won the Bert Greene Award for Essay Writing from the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP.com).

One chilly day that winter, at home, while I was in the midst of moving out of my husband’s house and refiguring my finances, a postcard arrived from Paris. “I couldn’t forget,” the Professor wrote. And neither could I. That spring, we met in Milan.

The most annoyed my mother has ever been with me was when I was traveling alone in Egypt and didn’t call home for a month. She wasn’t exactly happy when I went to Iraq just before the Persian Gulf War, either, and interviewed Yasir Arafat in a house that was bombed to smithereens days later.

Editor’s Note : This is one of many stories about our relationship with the natural world, which San Francisco is publishing over the next month as part of the May 2018 Great Outdoors Issue. To read stories as they become available online, click here.

Fly-fishing the waters of West Yellowstone is the stuff of dreams. Casting alongside your 85-year-old dad is the stuff of memories. By Laura Fraser Sunset Magazine, October 2013 I never understood my father’s love of fly- fishing.

Jill Giordano makes women’s clothing in what might be called sustainable designs: coats, pants, and dresses made with fine fabrics in timeless styles, and in combinations that can be mixed and matched any number of ways. Welcome to the art of “system” dressing-with quality. The goal: Improve your look, save the planet, and save money.

Laura Fraser | Photo: Kathrin Miller | June 18, 2012 The first man Jeanne Woodford executed was Manuel Babbitt. He’d been convicted of murdering a 78-year-old grandmother named Leah Schendel, who died of a heart attack after he broke into her Sacramento home during a 1980 crime spree and then viciously beat her.

Fifty years after Shinola closed as America’s quintessential shoe polish, it has resurfaced in an effort to become an entirely new icon: as the hero of a return to artisanal, “Made-in-America,” luxury goods. Is reviving craftsmanship that easy? By LAURA FRASER The aesthetic in Shinola’s stores is spare, light, maker chic.

Editor’s Note : This is one of many stories about our relationship with the natural world, which San Francisco is publishing over the next month as part of the May 2017 Great Outdoors Issue. To read stories as they become available online, click here.

In the 1500s, a Spanish bishop turned a collection of pueblos around the Mexican town of Patzcuaro into a center for craftsmanship. The people here are still making and marketing their wares in much the same way they did hundreds of years ago. Now they have to overcome tourists’ fears about drug traffickers, real or not.

U ntil a few of months ago, I had been a vegetarian for 15 years. Like most people who call themselves vegetarians (somewhere between 4 and 10 percent of us, depending on the definition; only 1 percent of Americans are vegans, eating no animal products at all), I wasn’t strict about it.

y older sister, Jan, visited me in San Francisco last spring. “You look great,” I told her, noticing that her clothes were hanging loose; she’d been heavy most of her life. “I’ve lost 60 pounds,” she said, and I automatically congratulated her. “I wasn’t trying,” she replied.